My cat is allowed on the porch and she is a viscous fly-eater but I don't let her get any other insect type just in case. She puked up a moth once and I about cried picking it up from all over the living room. So gross. Indoor kitties!

I once read that cats eat about 5-10 mice a day if not fed in addition. One of our cats doesnt hunt at all, she just plays with the dead mice her sister leaves. SHE really is a hunter... in summer we would get a mouse every second day on our porch. The tiny cat of my parents once brought a rat that was almost bigger than she was.

I was cat sitting for a friend a few months back and both her cats are mainly outdoor cats but they always have food and they have a cat door. Anyway, I went over there with Grey and something was off, then I realized what it was, feathers everywhere! All over the living room. I freaked, put Grey in the bedroom, he started screaming, a neighbor came over as I am trying to clean up bird bits all over the living room and my baby is screaming and she just stood there wanting to chat. Cats, why are they so mischievous?

My cat is indoors, but she likes to bat around and torture spiders/ants/earwigs before devouring them.

Mine are indoors too, and the only thing they will bother torturing are moths just because they make a lot of noise with their wings. The rest, they'll just lazily look at and go back to whatever they were doing before. Which is usually nothing.

i think it depends greatly on the cat. i had two semi-outdoor cats in university (not really my choice... they were persistent little buggers and i had roommates who were sloppy with closing the door) and the female cat killed a lot. the male was less successful but more ambitious... he was responsible for the maulings of a full grown squirrel and a rabbit. the female killed to eat, and appeared to have decimated our local mouse population. neither of them ever got any kind of bird that i saw.

after that experience, i'd sworn no cat of mine would be an outdoor cat, but i think that even so, the two i have right now would not be great hunters. laura is more motivated to go after insects and such inside, but hates the outdoors with a passion. thomas likes our balcony and front steps, but won't move a muscle to even eat a spider.

I adopted an 18 year old cat from the shelter years ago. We discovered she was a vicious killer a few months later, when I visited my parents at their new house. She only had a couple of teeth, so she never ate the mice. once, when I lived in this weird house in the mountains my even weirder landlady took her from my apartment and borrowed her for indoor mice killing purposes. The cat made a pile of 12 dead mice in her living room. Seriously, a neat little pile.Cats are great, but they're forked up killing machines at heart.

We have two cats and a dog on the farm that I work at. The super athletic dog is always getting blamed for the hunting (he is frequently caught using a dying bunny as a chew toy), but all of the killing is more accurately attributed to this tiny, TINY, little black cat. Everyone at work praises the little guy for keeping the rodents away, but I have to kind of ignore it. To be honest, it's kind of a part of organic farming, so the cat is helping us keep our product organic, and it's well...the natural order of things, but I am just getting a little bit freaked out by finding dead creatures everywhere.

We have two cats and a dog on the farm that I work at. The super athletic dog is always getting blamed for the hunting (he is frequently caught using a dying bunny as a chew toy), but all of the killing is more accurately attributed to this tiny, TINY, little black cat. Everyone at work praises the little guy for keeping the rodents away, but I have to kind of ignore it. To be honest, it's kind of a part of organic farming, so the cat is helping us keep our product organic, and it's well...the natural order of things, but I am just getting a little bit freaked out by finding dead creatures everywhere.

i know what you mean. our front patio was a graveyard. i know it was probably a good thing... it was mice that would possibly have been IN our building otherwise (shittily constructed student housing with accompanying lax student garbage disposal and hygienic/maintenance standards), but yeah, it was pretty sad too.

i think it depends greatly on the cat. i had two semi-outdoor cats in university (not really my choice... they were persistent little buggers and i had roommates who were sloppy with closing the door) and the female cat killed a lot. the male was less successful but more ambitious... he was responsible for the maulings of a full grown squirrel and a rabbit. the female killed to eat, and appeared to have decimated our local mouse population. neither of them ever got any kind of bird that i saw.

after that experience, i'd sworn no cat of mine would be an outdoor cat, but i think that even so, the two i have right now would not be great hunters. laura is more motivated to go after insects and such inside, but hates the outdoors with a passion. thomas likes our balcony and front steps, but won't move a muscle to even eat a spider.

Yes, but as the Oatmeal pointed out from the study, you may only see as much as 25% of the cat's kills. Many are left at the scene of the crime or entirely devoured.

Our cats are all indoor. Too many foxes in the area, for one thing. Not to mention traffic. If I had a fenced in area, I'd let them out now and then. I'd like to have a spot for them to get out in the sunshine and fresh air one of these days.

They hunt even when they're not hungry because they're predators. It's instinct, a survival trait honed by millions of years of evolution. They're programmed for killing. Nature is quite brutal, red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson noted.

This is doing nothing for my fear of cats. (Not all cats, but some cats. My mom had a cat that plotted to kill me. The first time I was home alone with her, she chased me upstairs and kept me locked in my bedroom for hours. My mom came home and found my crying in my closet.)

_________________I would eat Dr. Cow pocket cheese in a second. I would eat it if you hid it under your hat, or in your backpack, but not if it was in your shoe. That's where I draw the line. -allularpunk

i think it depends greatly on the cat. i had two semi-outdoor cats in university (not really my choice... they were persistent little buggers and i had roommates who were sloppy with closing the door) and the female cat killed a lot. the male was less successful but more ambitious... he was responsible for the maulings of a full grown squirrel and a rabbit. the female killed to eat, and appeared to have decimated our local mouse population. neither of them ever got any kind of bird that i saw.

after that experience, i'd sworn no cat of mine would be an outdoor cat, but i think that even so, the two i have right now would not be great hunters. laura is more motivated to go after insects and such inside, but hates the outdoors with a passion. thomas likes our balcony and front steps, but won't move a muscle to even eat a spider.

Yes, but as the Oatmeal pointed out from the study, you may only see as much as 25% of the cat's kills. Many are left at the scene of the crime or entirely devoured.

i wasn't suggesting that my cats didn't kill more than i saw? just that one was clearly better at it and more motivated than the other. according to the study, 1 in 3 cats is a real hunter... so out of my 4, it's not surprising that some would be more interested than others?

Mine is a lean mean killing machine. He leaves the evidence for my next door neighbour at her front door. He occassionally brings home presents for the dogs. He loves torturing flys and spiders with a slow, probably painful death. I'm sure he would kill me too if it wasn't for the fact I feed him.

I don't mean to be confrontational so don't feel the need to answer if you don't want to, but why let your cat out, then? Birds often won't move into areas just because they are afraid of cats, therefore having a greatly reduced habitat.

I don't mean to be confrontational so don't feel the need to answer if you don't want to, but why let your cat out, then? Birds often won't move into areas just because they are afraid of cats, therefore having a greatly reduced habitat.

I've only seen evidence of rats and mice. It is the norm here that cats are out rather than inside. I don't think I could manage to keep him in fulltime anyway. Even when I have tried to keep him in for one reason or another he has managed to sneak out.

My kitty is an indoor kitty but I know she is a killing machine. Whenever she hears the dogs moving toward the back door to be let out she runs in the living room, sits directly behind the door, and waits on it to shut. Then, she frantically searches for any and all bugs that may have managed to get in. She proceeds to chase and torture them. Sometimes she leaves them maimed for us to take care of. Other times she eats them so that she can puke them right back up.

I don't mean to be confrontational so don't feel the need to answer if you don't want to, but why let your cat out, then? Birds often won't move into areas just because they are afraid of cats, therefore having a greatly reduced habitat.

I've only seen evidence of rats and mice. It is the norm here that cats are out rather than inside. I don't think I could manage to keep him in fulltime anyway. Even when I have tried to keep him in for one reason or another he has managed to sneak out.

Fair enough. Once I moved to a less busy road, my cat has enjoyed lurking up the apartment stairs to see if the neighbor cat she wants to beat the shiitake out of is up there. (She is not usually ever up there. She does not beat her up. Cats are crassholes -- my cat is a crasshole.)

I don't mean to be confrontational so don't feel the need to answer if you don't want to, but why let your cat out, then? Birds often won't move into areas just because they are afraid of cats, therefore having a greatly reduced habitat.

I've only seen evidence of rats and mice. It is the norm here that cats are out rather than inside. I don't think I could manage to keep him in fulltime anyway. Even when I have tried to keep him in for one reason or another he has managed to sneak out.

Fair enough. Once I moved to a less busy road, my cat has enjoyed lurking up the apartment stairs to see if the neighbor cat she wants to beat the shiitake out of is up there. (She is not usually ever up there. She does not beat her up. Cats are crassholes -- my cat is a crasshole.)

lol! Mine is a bit sociable and wants to be friends with all the other cats and dogs. One of the neighbours said he is always in their garden playing with their cat, another neighbour said he is always trying to play with her cats that just want to kill him and then the other neighbour says she constantly finds him curled up with her dog in the kennel asleep. He has a better social life than I do. He was an indoor cat for it's first year here but one day bolted off out an open window. The neighbours have said since he has come along they haven't seen one single living mouse or rat which is a miracle in its self since we live right beside a bit field and rats climbing our walls was a regular thing.